Statistics you may not have heard or understood, that can be startling or frightening July 18
It happens to Anyone…Any Time…Anywhere… For any Reason
Written by Robert D. Sollars
As I’ve stated in my 3 books on active shooters, check out the website for the titles and links to purchase, www.sollarsviolenceprevention.com, in both the workplace & schools, statistics can be massaged & manipulated to fit the narrative of whoever is writing them. The truth is that all of those numbers have been massaged to give whatever outcome the statisticians desire, for reasons only they can definitively answer.
Granted, the following statistics were discovered before the pandemic reared its ugly head, so after this crisis is over… These statistics will come to life in innumerable ways, and we’ve seen that literally everywhere in this country, from Buffalo, NY. To Uvalde, TX. And if we don’t learn them and know how to combat them…then we’re lost in the myriad of lawsuits certain to arise after such incidents.
Now back to workplace/school violence prevention (WPV/SV), Let me try to enlighten you on what these statistics mean to myself, security professionals, & why they are important to everyone who goes to school, volunteers, or has a work address – even at home these days.
Hold onto your proverbial shorts, because we’re gonna run through these fairly quickly with a lot of them…so again, hold onto your hats in this tornado. The surveys in question were conducted by square Technologies in 2019 and Omnilert and Navigate360 were reported in 2020.
Getting up-to-date on the down & dirty of these new statistics… everyone has to work harder to prevent these incidents from occurring. You can’t just leave it to:
- Parents… birth, god, grand, or whoever is the guardian.
- Media talking heads who generally have no clue, and talk smoothly in soft professional tones and look really well on television, usually nothing more nothing less.
- Human resources, district, or organizational.
- School or organizational counselors.
- Teachers Or school administrators…too involved with their profiles and paychecks.
- Employee leads, supervisors, managers, & co-workers.
- Security professionals or even lowly paid/trained ‘scurty gards’.
- Law enforcement…to set in their ways and unable to change
- Therapists, psychiatrists/psychologists
- Priests or other similar religious leaders
Parents are the ones primarily responsible for teenagers and those in school while leads, supervisors, managers, & co-workers (yes co-workers & colleagues) are responsible for employees. To be perfectly honest, all of these people can be of valuable assistance, but unless someone speaks up and talks to others, as many in the above list as possible, about their reservations about someone…it’s very possible someone, or someone’s, will be injured or murdered, while at work or innocently at school, no matter how ‘bad ass’ they are, no one deserves to be murdered unless they’re trying to cause the murder first.
Now the statistics:
Omnilert and Navigate360:
17%of Americans say they don’t feel safe at work
57% of teens are worried a shooting could happen at their school.
55% say they would not know what to do should an emergency occur in school or at work,
54% said their office had no plan in place to deal with an emergency
52% of parents feel their child’s school is more dangerous than in 2019-2020
41% feel their workplace is less safe than it was six months ago.
square Technologies:
- 1 in 3 people worries about an active shooter, roughly 33%.
- 30 percent are afraid to walk around their community at night, even just to walk the dog or for a romantic stroll.
- 90 percent want better technology connecting first responders, but the cost of that is prohibitive.
- Millennial and Gen Z respondents, who were more likely to go through active shooter drills while growing up, were twice as concerned about active shooters as baby boomers, as they are in the majority age group of murdered people…they should be.
The following two stats come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
- 23% increase in workplace violence injuries in the past year.
- violence is now the second most common cause of fatalities in the workplace.
- Murder is the #1 cause of death on-the-job for women
These statistics came from an article in USA Today in November 2019:
- 34% of active shooter reports were false.
- ONLY 24% of all incidents involved firearms.
- In only 10.5% of all incidents, shots were fired.
- only 6% of school violence incidents were firearm related.
- Less than 1% of all school shootings use an AR-15 or other form of an assault rifle.
These statistics are presented to you the way I got them… you are smart people and can do the due diligence to decide which is right and which ones have been massaged, although some would consider these massaged already. But until you do, it’s always, and I do mean always, be aware of what is around you and the changing situations you encounter.
Like these blogs? Then please feel free to pass them along, with proper attribution, to friends, colleagues, or anyone who may benefit. Have them subscribe to my website: Sollars Violence Prevention Training & Consulting
It happens to Anyone…Any Time…Anywhere… For any Reason
I May Be Blind, but My Vision Is Crystal Clear
Copyright 2022 Robert D. Sollars
